Someone once said, "Parenting is the most important profession in the world," but parenting is often undervalued. How children and parents are valued and supported is not simply a social norm but a reflection of a value in society.
In community-based societies like many Asian countries, raising children isn't the only responsibility of their nuclear family but the extended family. Grandparents support their children with pregnancy, post-partum care, child care, family well-being, and family relationships, which are typical and expected. Caring for one's extended family helps generations to carry on the ideas and practices of family, empathy, and belonging. In the mix of caring for one's family, we often find an important concept of serving. Serving makes it possible to build a helpful family tradition. A stable family is the primary stabilizer that creates a cohesive community and society.
In an individualism-based society like the United States, nuclear families face increasingly stressful challenges. Without sustainable support from extended families, many parents are raising children alone. Relying on other parents has become an important way for families to get support and sustain.
It's crucial to form a bond with one another, but what's even more important is serving each other's needs by solving our collective challenges that impact our children and families. Even when these challenges are inconvenient, complex, and often seem impossible.
Even for parents who choose to speak up, advocating school models that work and serve children is often a topic to stay away from. It is partially because we want to respect teachers and schools and tell them we trust our children in their hands, and partially because we believe that we are not educators and aren't trained enough to help teachers and schools improve. But nothing can be further from the truth.
The massive public school closures have told us that we have reached the tipping point with the public school system, and our schools need all of us to step up and help them improve.
There are no better people out there than parents to take on the role of helping our schools. We know our children. We are the closest people to them who can even begin to understand. Only we have the emotional connection and heart-centered memories of them at their brightest to know when they genuinely find joy in something, and when their light is being dimmed. And that knowledge is gold.
Instead of avoiding the school model topic, I encourage you to learn and explore school models out there and find what's working for children.
When we aren't advocating for children's learning and school experiences around that center, we must ask ourselves: what are we fighting for? And who are we actually serving?
There is no better way to help someone by serving what they truly need.
